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In the first month of a new client I go on a huge citation building spree, and I've never encountered an issue. Some of the citations are directories, so I would say that you should have no problems. Just make sure you just use the companies name in the directories, and don't try getting any keywords in there. The links aren't worth much at all, like Jesse said, and trying to keyword stuff will just end up hurting your efforts.

Potentially. Depends on the directories. Directories in general carry little-to-no value and most end up hurting more than helping. Especially blog directories. Google doesn't like these sites and generally it's my least favorite method of grabbing links for SEO. Local listings is important, however, and there are some directory sites that are decent enough to warrant grabbing links from but I'd say there aren't many more than 5 in all of the internet galaxy.

To dumb it down, if your question is simply "will building 20 links in one day get us a penalty?" the answer is most likely "no." However if the links are poison and this pattern continues, expect a penalty to be imposed eventually.

We have done research on the directories we use, and try to focus on sites with high DA and Pagerank, and a few within our vertical. I agree that the majority of directories have no value, and tend to cause a negative effect. We do take care of the social links, but many of our new clients do not yet have a social presence, so it must first be created and built out before we link to it. That pretty much negates my main concern.

A couple years ago directories used to be a decent technique for improving your rank, but have since been devalued through algorithm changes. SEOMoz probably maintains them because they can have an impact in local results as some of them can count as citations.

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